Since the launch of the computer revolution decades ago, data has been steadily migrated or been duplicated to exist in electronic or digital form. Today, a very significant portion of personal or other information about many individuals or other entities exists in this form, and those individuals or entities have come to rely on the utility and convenience of computer-based data storage, since these data stores can be accessed by way of computer networks. However, the domain of data storage is often plagued by conflicting interests such as privacy versus accessibility.
In the domain of medical or health record storage, these conflicting interests are especially apparent. For example, many individuals are quite adverse to personal health-oriented data from being discovered by unauthorized or unanticipated third parties. At the same, these individuals generally desire the ability to conveniently share this data with a personal physician or other trusted parties, such as scientists who wish to perform research that might benefit others. As a result, current network-accessible medical database are structured such that a server controls all access to the data, which introduces a number of difficulties. First, the server has full access to the data because either the data is not encrypted or by virtue of control of the decryption keys, which raises concerns for the individuals with data hosted on the server.
Second, granting access to one's medical records is typically an all-or-nothing proposition due to the conflicting issues. Thus, even though the individual might want an authorized party to see some information but not other information, the individual has very little control. For example, the individual might want her dentist to only see a smaller amount or a subset of data that is visible to her personal physician. Furthermore, such databases can be a rich source of medical research, which might even be encouraged or approved by the individual, but again the individual has very little control of what information another entity can see about her if she grants access.